Victims of Light Pollution....

Hi All,

On Saturday 5-Apr-08, I and Nilesh we planned for Astrophoto session from my home at Thane. Nilesh come from Pune with his C9.25 and HX9 CCD cam. We were hoping to set it up on LXD75.

But it did not go on it as we did not have dovetail plate for it :(

Anyways we decided to use my AT66 (focal length 400mm) and Mead DSI color for photography. Nilesh fixed RoboFocuser on AT66. That reduced our great efforts for focusing Mead DSI. as those who used any CCD cam knows what a pain to focus it... Using robofocus its just 5min job to get perfect focus !!!

We Started at around 12 and setup was ready to use by 1:00 as we spent some time for visual use too...

Then come the next frustration act searching for targets in light polluted sky and that too in Leo / Virgo sky where there are many galaxies, which we do avoid as being beginner...

And further to push us hard we don't have finder on AT66, as it is very small scope... finding galaxies with small scope was pain ( even M4 was not visible when it was 40 degrees above horizon... Its Glow from Mumbai and Thane....)

After searching fruitless Nilesh advised remove cam and use eyepiece to find targets and then use cam... This worked and we got first target M51.. thoough it was not visible in Scope we know for sure where it is so we set it using eyepiece and then put DSI back. the focusing was not an issue now. and took 30 sec preview :D wow the galaxy was just near the corner. we center it using 15sec expos... and then started actual shot.. we Set Cam at Monochrome Mode as we found the color mode after subtracting dark frame causing some false color.. and set exposure to 30sec...

The best feature of Meade DSI it auto selects the good frames and stacks based on track stars provided to it.. this helps to avoid tracking errors...

We stacked around 45 frames and the result is.....

M51 : Stack of 45x30s


Later we tried following objects but the extream light pollution caused to drop out many frames in Auto Stacking and the resultant were not so good.... I hope i can upload maually processed images some where in this week, as I have all individual images which were taken during auto stacking....

M4


M8 - Lagoon Nebula


M22 - In Color


Do post your comments and suggestions

Cheers
Sameer